I get up last and sit by it, while he cooks breakfast.  We have a cold lunch at noon, and I cook supper—­very much against my will.  However, one must have one good meal a day, and if I were to live on Dan’s abominable cookery, I should lose my appetite, you know.  Dan attended Dr. Chorpenning’s funeral yesterday, and he felt as though he ought to wear a white shirt—­and we had a jolly good time finding such an article.  We turned over all our traps, and he found one at last—­but I shall always think it was suffering from yellow fever.  He also found an old black coat, greasy, and wrinkled to that degree that it appeared to have been quilted at some time or other.  In this gorgeous costume he attended the funeral.  And when he returned, his own dog drove him away from the cabin, not recognizing him.  This is true.

You would not like to live in a country where flour was $40 a barrel?  Very well; then, I suppose you would not like to live here, where flour was $100 a barrel when I first came here.  And shortly afterwards, it couldn’t be had at any price—­and for one month the people lived on barley, beans and beef—­and nothing beside.  Oh, no—­we didn’t luxuriate then!  Perhaps not.  But we said wise and severe things about the vanity and wickedness of high living.  We preached our doctrine and practised it.  Which course I respectfully recommend to the clergymen of St. Louis.

Where is Beack Jolly?—­[a pilot]—­and Bixby? 
                                             Your Brother
          
                                                  Sam.

IV

LETTERS 1863-64.  “MARK TWAIN.”  COMSTOCK JOURNALISM.  ARTEMUS WARD

There is a long hiatus in the correspondence here.  For a space of many months there is but one letter to continue the story.  Others were written, of course, but for some reason they have not survived.  It was about the end of August (1862) when the miner finally abandoned the struggle, and with his pack on his shoulders walked the one and thirty miles over the mountains to Virginia City, arriving dusty, lame, and travel-stained to claim at last his rightful inheritance.  At the Enterprise office he was welcomed, and in a brief time entered into his own.  Goodman, the proprietor, himself a man of great ability, had surrounded himself with a group of gay-hearted fellows, whose fresh, wild way of writing delighted the Comstock pioneers far more than any sober presentation of mere news.  Samuel Clemens fitted exactly into this group.  By the end of the year he had become a leader of it.  When he asked to be allowed to report the coming Carson legislature, Goodman consented, realizing that while Clemens knew nothing of parliamentary procedure, he would at least make the letters picturesque.

It was in the midst of this work that he adopted the name which he was to make famous throughout the world.  The story of its adoption has been fully told elsewhere and need not be repeated here.—­[See Mark Twain:  A Biography, by the same author; Chapter XL.]